Student ID: 21D18254 Name: Yifei Cai Lecture name: Global_RD Session:5

During this lecture, we met with Mr. Ohtsuki who works in the Microsoft company. It was an
interesting opportunity to meet someone from the big tech companies. In that lecture, we were
informed of the ambitions and future endeavors of Microsoft, as well as the possible career paths
inside the company, and the research efforts carried out in it.

The first point is that Microsoft is actively working to reduce the output carbon emissions.
Microsoft is well aware of the climate change problems that would cause undesirable increments
in our planet’s temperature, hence they devised a firm plan to get rid of all the emissions by 2030.
They want to remove the carbon they produce after it has been emitted. In order to do that, they
strive to apply different strategies, such as managing forests and soil sequestration from a bio-
spherical perspective, or by air-capture and BECCS technique from a geo-spherical perspective.

The second point is the illustration of the three big ambitions of Microsoft; reinventing
productivity, building the intelligent cloud, and making computing more personal and natural. For
the first ambition, they continue to develop techniques to allow you to do your job better while
having a unique outstanding life. Regarding the second ambition, they strive to convert the massive
amounts of data into intelligence for the purposes of smoothening the decision-making process as
well as tracking health issues in one’s body. As for the personalization point, they are trying to
achieve it through the direct speech and talking to Cortana; which resembles Alexa in Apple.

The third point is the advanced research they continuously conduct. They intensively and heavily
research on Artificial intelligence, computer vision, human-computer interaction, security, privacy,
cryptography, systems and networking. With this much amount of research, I am interested a lot
to work as a PhD researcher in the company. I developed some AI programs before, so I guess I
can work there to discover and implement the more advanced schemes of AI.

Microsoft also hosts a research summit; in which experts, scientists, developers, programmers, and
researchers present their revolutionary new ideas. One aspect of their research is (Seeing AI)
tailored for blind people. This beneficial app allows for speaking the text out as soon as it appears
in front of the camera, providing audio guidance through a document, giving audio beeps to
identify products, recognizing friends around you and describing their emotions, describing the
scenery around you, identifying currency bills, depicting the brightness level around you, and even
reading the handwritten texts.